There is a Point

If you hurt someone enough for a long enough they will loose their connection to their true self.

It is not the ego that is lost, and it doesn’t take much, just a little petty suffering and deprivation meted out over the years.

To great trials and persecution the ego and identity rally. There is an integrity within those things that is all their own and lent to whomever may find themselves in those circumstances, deserving of it or not.

What I do has no integrity of its own. There is no functional way of disearning me from a charlatan except in that what I do is, of itself, real and without artifice. There is no school, no grand technique, no god or church at my back. Just me and whatever integrity I bring with me when I wake in the morning.

Maybe you can understand then, why it terrifies me when I feel so close to that point of loosing my true self, even for a moment. I don’t have anything else.